Video: Building The Chevrolet Volt

The Chevrolet Volt will soon have its day in the sun. The range-extended EV is the darling of the green set, and General Motors is betting it’s the car that leads it to a leaner, greener — and more profitable — future.

So how are things shaping up for the General’s much-anticipated electric car? Quite well thank you very much, and we’ve got some video to prove it.

GM started building pre-production Volts — known in the business as integration vehicles — on May 27. The first of them hit the road for some serious shakedown testing (and not a little PR) at the end of June. Integration vehicles are used to refine things like driving dynamics, and they’re also the cars that get beaten up and kicked around to ensure they’re ready for the real world.

So here we are at step one in the long process of actually assembling something as complicated as a modern automobile. Now, please keep in mind that what you see rolling down the line are preproduction Volts. So any snags or miscues that you might notice (and we didn’t see many if at all) will most definitely not be reflected in the models that will be sitting on showroom floors near you.

Let’s go to the tapes:

For all the high-tech wizardry going into the Volt, it’s somehow reassuring to see so much of it is still basic American craftsmanship; jig-setting, spot welding and die grinding. It’s all stuff any machinist from 50 years ago could recognize. Same goes for any body and fender man worth his primer, because that color is going on like glass.

But this is just the start. As the Volt moves down the line, there will be more videos to come, and we’ll make sure that you see them. We can hardly wait until they start integrating all the high tech goodies like the lithium-ion battery pack and electric motor. That’s when the real fun starts.